Space Weather Observations, Alerts, and Forecast

3-day Solar-Geophysical Forecast

Real Time Images of the Sun

The sun is constantly monitored for sun spots and coronal mass ejections.
EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) images the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths,
and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures.
In the images taken at 304 Angstrom the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin.
In those taken at 171 Angstrom, at 1 million degrees.
195 Angstrom images correspond to about 1.5 million Kelvin, 284 Angstrom to 2 million degrees.
The hotter the temperature, the higher you look in the solar atmosphere.

Auroral Activity Extrapolated from NOAA POES

Instruments on board the NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) continually monitor the power flux carried by the protons and electrons that produce aurora in the atmosphere. SWPC has developed a technique that uses the power flux observations obtained during a single pass of the satellite over a polar region (which takes about 25 minutes) to estimate the total power deposited in an entire polar region by these auroral particles.
The power input estimate is converted to an auroral activity index that ranges from 1 to 10.